Quotes by Alan Kay

“Normal is the greatest enemy with regard to creating the new. And the way of getting around this is you have to understand normal not as reality, but just a construct. And a way to do that, for exa...”

“Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.”

“I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.”

“Technology is anything invented after you were born.”

“I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lyin...”

“Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.”

“There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitat...”

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

“The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.”

“Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

“Perspective is worth 80 I.Q. points.”

“[ Computing ] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay ...”

“A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

“Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.”

“The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want...”

“Actually I made up the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.”

“... greatest single programming language ever designed. (About the Lisp programming language.)”

“I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were Maxwell’s Equations of Software!”

“Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.”